Fereydanian dialect – first notes and linguistic approaches

Abstract

Fereydanian has been a subject of research of a number of generations of Georgian scholars.

Since the end of 19th century, many other sources report about the Georgian-speaking population in Fereydan.

In his book ‘Georgians in Persia’ Lado Aġniašvili gives short linguistic observations regarding lexical and morphological issues (1896).

Aġniašvili was the first who noticed an internal differentiation of Fereydanian dialect.He was In Fereydan in 1894 and found evidence for different uses of words in different villages for the same objects.

The Fereydanian dialect has gained scientific interest since the beginning of the 20th century. The term ’Fereydnuli’ (Fereydanian Georgians Speech) was coined by Arnold Čikobava in 1923.

There are many importens researches about Fereydanian dialect (Y.Marr, M. Todua, M Machavariani, T. Uturgaidze, D. Chkhubianishvili, J. Giunashvili, N. Bartaia, B. Rezvani…).

Beginning from 2004 we actively got involved in the process of researching and documenting of Fereydanian. Presently, the Georgian Dialect Corpus integrates Georgian dialect data, among them – Fereydanian texts and dictionary; flexible tools of the Corpus allow to more clearly determine a place of the Fereydanian dialect within the common Georgian dialect areal, attitudes with other dialects and standard language, to identify archaic phenomena and borrowings.

The paper focuses on key issues in the history of studies Fereydanian dialect.